Bitcoin Wiki

Intuitively, we’re in a what could be described as an “anonymity battle” with governments agencies and corporations fighting digital citizens. This cyber battle has become a world where no data is private, making it nearly impossible to keeping your anonymity, financial or not, even in extreme circumstances. For example the creator of bitcoin, Satoshi N akamoto, who has made extreme attempts to hide his identity is under consistent threat by media, governments (likely), and an ever powerful cypherpunk citizen population to acquire and potentially expose his true identity. Foreign Governments and the US government departments battle each other for more intelligence. How much anonymity exists in today’s world is coming to light as Edward Snowden’s documents are released by the press. One may need to depend on flooding every site with disinformation to throw off collection practices. The National Security Agency(NSA) keeps track of everything from internet protocols, traffic patterns, and who does what over the world wide web. Ultimately, this paper focuses on digital financial transactions. The closest thing we have to financial anonymity is the bitcoin protocol, not to be confused with bitcoin the p2p network. Only recently has the cypherpunk community realized that in addition to the p2p public ledger (the “Blockchain”, a decentralized source of truth that’s both secure and transparent), the protocol of bitcoin itself can be traced just like traditional data. The combination of both the bitcoin protocol and the public ledger opens up holes for anonymity potentially worse then traditional fiat currency.

The cyberpunk community is now realizing that bitcoin transactions can be traced to an individual person based on information found in the blockchain’s public ledger and other sources. But how is that? Bitcoins under TOR are supposed to be anonymous and impossible to trace to their users. With the indecent at SilkRoad, an online market, the game changed following the founder being jailed and had his funds taken by the United States government. The SilkRoad was an online marketplace for illegal drugs which used bitcoin & .onion (requiring TOR) to further protect the user’s anonymity. The users traded their bitcoins for products then back into cash in US dollars via a bitcoin exchange. Because users are switching back into fiat currency, governments or banks can provide a very detailed account of information such as, bank account information, name, address, and so on. In the bitcoin network, every single transaction is written on a very large document called the blockchain(public ledger). Government officials had used the block chain to trace down first: where the coins had been sent to. Once they found out the coins had been sent to an exchange, the government subpoenaed banks for the information regarding accounts of who the wallet belonged to, and with that information accessed countless of other databases on the user to form a more complete picture. In the case of the Silk Road founder, the owner had coins stashed away in a local wallet on a specialty designed laptop that encrypts the harddrive on the action of closing the laptop lid. The government SWAT team was able to apprehend the user while in the midst of working, before the founder could physically close the laptop lid to protect himself from data forensics. His funds are now in the possession of the FBI.